This 1944 film shows women working in an airport control tower during WWII. Prior to this time, women never worked in control operations, but the manpower shortage of the war necessitated their training and employment. The film primarily shows the operation of the control tower and explains its operation, as well as the effort to draft women into the air traffic control role.
This information comes from an FAA website:
During World War II, women entered the ranks of air traffic controllers and aircraft communicators in large numbers to replace men who joined the war effort. Since then, historians have long tried to identify the “first” female controller. In fact, many have long considered Mary Chance VanScyoc as the first woman controller, while others report Ruth Thomas, Madelyn Brown Pert, or Marian McKenna Russell as the first.
On August 25, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the First Supplemental National Defense Appropriation Act, which provided $12,186,000 for the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) to construct, operate, and maintain airport traffic control towers. The law required the Secretaries of Army and Navy to certify a list of 39 airports as essential to national defense, and the CAA would assume air traffic operations at those airports from the local airport authority. To staff these towers, the CAA hired many of the controllers employed by the airport authorities and already working in the towers.
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and U.S. entry into the war, the War and Navy Departments designated additional airports as essential for CAA to take over air traffic control operations. By the end of fiscal year 1942, CAA operated 59 towers and by the end of fiscal year 1944 that number had grown to 115.
By late 1942 women comprised approximately 40 percent of the controller trainees. An article in the Civil Aeronautics Journal in December 1942 reported that “women graduates of past sessions are already serving satisfactorily in a number of airport control towers and airway traffic control centers.” Although the journal did not indicate when they were hired, it did identify Billie Gallagher and Martha Olson as already working in the control tower at St. Louis and Marcelline Price and Carolyn Lorenz in the airway traffic control center at the same airport. The article noted that all four had completed CAA pilot training courses before the agency had closed that training to women, which meant they probably joined the CAA before the agency dropped the prerequisite for a pilot’s license in June 1942.
When the war ended, many of the men who had left CAA to join the war effort reclaimed their jobs. Although many women controllers quit after the war to raise their families, a number of them stayed on the job and rose through the CAA and later FAA ranks.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
